Gas for $2.14? The catch is it’s compressed natural gas

SARTA’s compressed natural gas station provided the backdrop Wednesday for a forum hosted by the Stark County Oil and Gas Partnership and regional chambers of commerce highlighting natural gas as vehicle fuel.

SARTA opened its public fueling station in May 2012, and this year expects to dispense the equivalent of 600,000 gallons of gasoline or diesel fuel.

The station provided the backdrop Wednesday for a forum on natural gas vehicles hosted by the Stark County Oil and Gas Partnership, a group that highlights business opportunities connected with the oil and gas industry.

GAS BENEFITS

Proponents tout natural gas vehicles as a way to reduce air pollution, fuel costs and dependence on foreign oil. The subject has gained more attention as exploration increases in eastern Ohio, where the number of Utica Shale wells drilled topped 500 last week.

Clean Fuels Ohio is a not-for-profit organization that promotes a range of alternative fuels, including natural gas.

Andrew Conley, Clean Fuels Ohio program director, said transportation uses about 28 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States. Nearly all of the fuel that powers our planes, trains and automobiles is derived from oil.

Some vehicles run exclusively on CNG. Others can switch between natural gas and traditional fuels, or burn a mix of natural gas and diesel, such as one of the buses in SARTA’s fleet.

“Cost is a significant market driver in this area,” Conley said.

Switching to natural gas also decreases carbon dioxide, particulate and nitrogen oxide emissions, although environmentalists note that methane is a potent greenhouse gas in its own right, and point to the ecological costs of shale drilling, also called fracking.

DOMESTIC SOURCES

The natural gas used in vehicles comes in different forms.

CNG is delivered to a station by pipeline and is good for regional fleets that return to the same base at the end of a shift, Conley said.

Liquid natural gas is chilled and trucked to a station. Because more LNG can be stored in a vehicle’s tank, it is preferred by long-haul fleets, he said.

There is also renewable natural gas, which is produced by the decomposition of biological material.

Some 98 percent of the gas consumed in the U.S. comes from North America, with the majority from domestic production, Conley said.

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“A huge game changer, quite frankly, has been the shale plays,” added Joanne M. Hayes, a business development manager with Clean Energy.

The company, founded by oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, has 400 stations around the country and fuels more than 30,000 natural gas vehicles a day. It also constructed and maintains SARTA’s station and markets it to other users.

SARTA EXPERIENCE

SARTA used a combination of federal grants, stimulus funds and its own money to build the $1.6 million station.

The transit authority has 34 vehicles that run on CNG and is getting three more vans, Conrad said.

After tax credits, SARTA pays about 50 cents per gallon equivalent. The price to the public is higher, factoring in costs such as station construction and maintenance, gas compression and profit margin.

Conrad said he expects using natural gas will save SARTA a total of $356,000 this year.

The transit authority also has made $24,000 since the station opened by selling natural gas to users such as waste hauler Kimble Companies Inc., Frito-Lay and Chesapeake Energy.